The Change Room {pt.1}

She walks in through the tall two-way doors.
Coming in from daylight she notices instantly that this place has no windows.
Other than the tacky looking rope lights, the club was in complete darkness.
The feeling running through her was similar to the feeling you get when you know you've made a horrible mistake but your circumstances almost forces you to go through with it.
Like putting an empty envelope into the ATM to get cash to eat for the day. (Times were rough)


Sometimes in life, all you have are messed up choices.


A short Asian guy approaches her, asks for her I.D.
After seeing she is a year under the age of approval, he hands he back her I.D. and says in a thick Cantonese accent, "do you go on stage?"


That question alone made her stomach drop.
The thought of dancing through three songs around a single pole in front of an audience of mostly men with one simple agenda running through their minds, knowing her job would have to be to impress these men (most old enough to be her grandfather) who may have well been drooling at the sight of her young skin, was enough to make her turn around and head straight for the doorway and never return.


but....


She'd be running back out into the world, to a dirty basement apartment she shared with a old high school friend.
To an empty fridge.
A family that temporarily disowned her.
No reliable real friends.
Not only an empty apartment but an empty soul.


Thinking of those factors suddenly gave her incentive to sum up the courage to go through with what would be the beginning of the end of her purity and pride.
If the shame she had naturally tied into her DNA were a tree, that moment was the start of that tree beginning to die.


The first leave dried up and crumbled then slowly floated to the ground to be stomped on by a passing stranger.


Before she knew it, she found herself in the change room.






....to be continued.


YoursTruly.